How Kavita Shukla Is Changing the Way We Eat

Kavita was visiting her grandmother in India when she accidentally swallowed tap water while brushing her teeth. She panicked, but with a flurry of activity in the kitchen, her grandma produced a murky brown concoction of herbs and spices for Shukla to drink—and she never got sick. She was fascinated by her grandmother's wisdom and, when she returned home to the U.S., began experimenting with the effects of various spices by dipping strawberries into them to find out which prevented bacteria and fungus from growing. After competing in an international science fair, judges took notice of her project and advised her to protect her research.

So, at age 17 and a senior in high school, she got a patent for FreshPaper, a sheet of paper infused with a secret blend of organic spices that prohibits bacterial and fungal growth on fresh fruits and vegetables. After graduating with a degree in economics from Harvard, she launched her company, Fenugreen (named for fenugreek, one of the plants in her patented combination). FreshPaper is now sold in stores across the U.S., as well as 35 other countries.

So how did she do it all at such a young age? There are a few key lessons to be learned from Shukla's success.

Power through the discouragement. Shukla's college started a nonprofit through which she tried to distribute FreshPaper, but it did not go so well. "That was the first time I almost gave up on this," she explains. "I started to think that it probably didn't have any real-world applications." After some well-intentioned advisers told her to move on after high school, Shukla took their advice and got a research job, but she couldn't get FreshPaper out of her mind. "Doing research actually helped me realize how even the best ideas, left in the lab—or in my case, the kitchen—were of no use to anyone at all." So, she started producing small batches of FreshPaper on her own, handing them out at farmers' markets—and from there, business took off.

Sometimes the best ideas are the most basic. Herbs and spices, which we all have in our kitchen, could help prevent the spoilage of 25 percent of the world's food? It seems too easy and good to be true, even to Shukla. "It's a very simple kind of concept, and I think that was almost what held me back for a long time because I kept thinking, you know, it's so simple," she says. "Even when my grandma first gave it to me, it just seemed too simple to really understand, but then I realized that's really what made it so special. It is really simple, but it can be used by anyone in any part of the world."

While you might want to help the whole world, start small. Shukla's motivation for distributing FreshPaper was to try to help people in the developing world, like in her grandmother's small village. Talking to people at the farmers' markets, however, she learned there was a very local need. "For the first time I realized that spoilage was a huge problem for people right in my own backyard. As I learned more about it, I found out that over 50 million Americans are food insecure." Around the time of Hurricane Sandy last summer, Fenugreen began a Buy a Pack, Give a Pack program to help the victims in New York and New Jersey, by donating a pack of FreshPaper to a local food bank for every pack bought. And this year, they're looking to take things even further by partnering with NGOs to get FreshPaper to small-scale farmers in the developing world and the 1.6 billion people who don't have access to refrigeration. And that, to Shukla, is the best part of all of this.